Writing (Ancient Peoples and Places series) by David Diringer

Broad, shallow overview of ancient scripts

In 1957, the London publisher Thames & Hudson began publishing a series of books on archaeology entitled Ancient Peoples and Places, which eventually grew to 113 volumes. In most cases, each book synthesizes the current research on a particular region or ancient civilization. The 25th book in the series, however, was the first volume to break that rule by focusing instead on the worldwide ancient history of a particular cultural phenomenon: Writing. That book entitled Writing, written by David Diringer, was first published in 1962.

Diringer starts by explaining the distinctions between pictographic, ideographic, transitional, phonetic or syllabic, and alphabetic forms of writing. He then goes on to examine individual scripts of different regions of the world and their chronological development. He starts by discussing the first pictographic symbols of prehistoric peoples. He then examines ancient writing styles of the Near East, including cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittite hieroglyphics, and the Minoan or Cretan scripts Linear A and B. This is followed by a chapter on East Asian scripts, which only covers Chinese and Japanese, with a brief addendum on Easter Island writing. Then follows a chapter on the pre-Colombian writing of the Maya and Aztecs. Not surprisingly, the most coverage is reserved for the ancient languages that were precursors to our own alphabet, which arose out of Semitic scripts that precursed the Phoenician, Greek, and finally Latin alphabets. Multiple side trips are taken into other written languages, such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Indian scripts. The book is illustrated with many transcriptions of ancient writing, photographs of inscribed artifacts, and phonetic and alphabetic tables of the languages covered.

The books in the Ancient People and Places series are meant to be concise introductory texts for students and general readers. They typically run about 200 pages, with many illustrations and charts, plus another 60 pages of photographs. In a book of that size, Diringer can’t provide a comprehensive history of every ancient script, so he had to make choices about what to feature and what to omit. Nevertheless, he covers a surprisingly large number and broad variety of languages here. What you get in this book is a little bit of knowledge about a lot of different scripts and their cultures. Diringer provides enough information to pique one’s interest, so the reader can seek out further information on specific languages in more specialized texts.

I read the first edition of this book from 1962. At that time, the Minoan script Linear B had just been deciphered, and the Mayan glyphs had not been completely deciphered. Soviet scholar Yuri Knozorov would put the finishing touches on cracking that code a few years later. I’m sure a lot of other discoveries have been made regarding ancient scripts in the past 60 years. Nevertheless, as emphasized before, this is a basic introduction to the field, and much of the fundamentals have survived the test of time. There’s not enough space here for Diringer to teach you how to read any of these scripts anyway, so if you require that level of detail and accuracy, look for a more advanced text. As a general overview, I enjoyed this book. It provides a clear outline of the development of alphabets over millennia, and it brought to my attention a few ancient civilizations and their scripts with which I was unfamiliar. I have been pleased with the volumes of the Ancient Peoples and Places Series that I have seen thus far, and I look forward to reading more of them.
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